Once upon a time, there was a company called Netscape who was investigating a new market: portal sites and content syndication. The idea was simple: a variety of websites produce relevant content in a (nearly) continuous flow. Portals would be designed to aggregate news and content from those sites and present it to the user all in one page…

Thus, Netscape invented a format called RSS, which stood for “Remote Site Syndication". This spec allows content producers to publish their news/content in an “RSS feed” (an XML based document) and content consumers to periodically check those feeds for updates.

When Netscape lost interest in developing portals, they abandonned their original (and complex) RSS 0.9 spec as well as their efforts in creating a more appropriate and simpler version. At that time, UserLand picked up the simpler 0.91 spec and applied it to its blog tools. RSS had become “Really Simple Syndication".

Today, the blogging community still uses RSS extensively: every (serious) blogger publishes an RSS feed of his posts and readers aggregate all their favorites blogs’ feeds in an aggregator. This, of course, makes it more convenient to check for new posts daily on all your favorite blogs…

b2evolution is an example of a blog tool used to publish RSS feeds. SharpReader is an example of a program used to aggregate RSS feeds.

Then, the story gets more and more complicated…

UserLand started improving on RSS 0.91 which actually was a little bit too simple. That led to RSS 0.92, 0.93, 0.94…

But another group had started working on a successor to RSS 0.9 when Netscape dropped it. This group was more concerned with completeness than with simplicity. The result of their work has been released as RSS 1.0. This format is based on RDF and is so complex that UserLand decided to go on with its own branch and finally released RSS 2.0… which is a successor to RSS 0.94, not RSS 1.0 !

This is why we have so many different RSS formats in use today. :-/

In an effort to make everybody happy and focus on a single syndication format, a new group has been created to work on a new format called Atom. This new format, currently at version 0.3, is full of promises… but it is too early to tell if it will finally be the one and only syndication spec, accepted by all… Let’s hope so. ;)

2007 Update

Some time has passed. RSS 2.0 now seems to be the de facto standard used for blogs, forums, news sites, podcasts and event torrent feeds! (Atom is probably technically superior but it seems that history likes to repeat the VHS vs. Betamax scenario ;))

It has become very easy to (freely) subscribe to RSS feeds, as all you need to do now is to click on the RSS icon in the address bar of Firefox 2 or Internet Explorer 7. After that, you just need to choose your favorite reader — the most popular ones being pre-configured.

If you want to generate RSS feeds for people to subscribe to, you can do so with a variety of tools like b2evolution. It is blog/news/podcast software that you install on your own hosting account (hosting can be shared web hosting, a VPS, a dedicated server or even just a cheap hosting plan depending on how many users you will have.)

Blog software like b2evolution lets you type posts which get published to your site automatically and concurrently generates a matching RSS feed of all new posts.

You can’t say that “every blogger publishes an RSS feed". I can’t count the number of sites here in the US that don’t have a feed. The ones that are really bad about this are the personal sites. When I moved to KC, I started trying to find local blogs to help me get an idea as to what was going on in the city and probably 70% of the sites have no feed at all. Once you get used to using feeds to keep up-to-date, it’s actually quite annoying to go to site that doesn’t have one.

I’ve found SAGE to be a great feedreader (aggregator) for those of us who use Firefox - it integrates smoothly with the browser and can search a site for any recognised feed just by clicking a button. Nice and easy!

Personally, I use Mozilla Thunderbird (http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/), a email/rss/newsgroup reader that is a companion program to Firefox (http://www.getfirefox.com/). Like Firefox, it is both free and open source, and (IMHO) a much better alternative to Outlook Express. I used to use OE, but then needed to access an IMAP account, and found OE to be severely lacking in this capability. I took a peek at Eudora, but was turned off by paying for a full version. Then, I found Thunderbird, and I have used it ever since.

Onto another topic, what are the advantages/disadvantages of each type. AFAIK, Thunderbird can handle “anything", but I would like to know why I would want to (for example), choose an Atom feed over RSS 2.0.

Now that feed reading is built into popular browsers like Internet Explorer 7, users are beginning to rely on their browser’s RSS button as a way to see what’s new on the site that they’ve navigated to, when a “What’s New” link is not readily apparent. So RSS feeds are becoming a form of on-site navigation.